'Then you shall say goodnight, and afterwards I will take you to your bed,' said her brother.
The child ran downstairs, and, listening at the library door, heard voices coming from within. She saw the wide-brimmed hat on the settle, and she made a face up at John, who was watching her from the stairs.
'It's Ned Brodrick with father,' she whispered.
'Never mind, go and kiss him goodnight,' said John.
Jane's small shoulders shook with laughter, and then, drawing herself up and composing her face to suitable gravity, she knocked at the library door. Her father was standing before the fireplace, confronting his visitor, whose features, though leaner and more cadaverous, bore a striking resemblance to his own. Ned Brodrick was, in point of fact, his natural brother, and John Brodrick, with a curious sense of family duty, had made him his agent now for a number of years. The mother, an extremely respectable woman who had been dairy-maid at Clonmere when she had caught the roving eye of John Brodrick's father, lived on a small pension in one of the cottages at Oakmount, and Ned dwelt with her. The ten pounds annuity left to him by his father when he died in 1800 was given to him with the pious hope, expressed in old Henry Brodrick's own words, that 'the sum would keep him out of the mischief that had brought him into the world.' The hope had not been fulfilled, however, for Ned Brodrick, disregarding his father's wishes, had become the parent of no less than four illegitimate children, all by different mothers. He was glad, therefore, to supplement his annuity by what he could earn as agent to his brother, and he was careful never to presume upon his relationship in any way, so that John Brodrick was always 'Mr. Brodrick,' and his nieces 'the young ladies.' He was, as it happened, as good an agent as John Brodrick could hope to find, and if he made a little extra for his own pocket now and again by falsifying the rent-roll of the tenants, it was no more and no less than any other man would have done in his place.
'Good evening, Miss Jane,' he said now, with his customary bow and his usual look of solemnity, so far removed from mischief that it seemed hardly possible he could have ignored Henry Brodrick's will.
'Good evening, Ned,' replied the child, turning swiftly from him and lifting her face to her father.
John Brodrick picked Jane up and kissed her on both cheeks, his hard, rather ruthless expression softening as he did so. This little daughter was very dear to him, dearer almost than Henry, if it were possible, and he looked forward to the time when she should become a companion to him and not merely an enchanting plaything.
'Goodnight,' he said gently, 'sleep well,' and watching her for an instant while she opened the door, he then dismissed her from his mind and turned back again to his brother.
Jane climbed the stairs in search of John, but of course-it was typical of him-he had forgotten his promise, and she had to wander along the passage to his room in the tower, at the end of the house.
Jane found him with the window flung open, looking out towards the creek, shining silver under the moon, with the dark hump of Doon Island away in the distance.
She knelt on the window-seat beside her brother, and they were silent for a moment.
'John,' she said presently, 'what will they do to Hungry Hill? Will they spoil it, so that we can never go there again for picnics?'
'They will spoil the part where the mine is to be,' said John; 'there'll be chimneys, and shafts, and engines. You've seen pictures of mines, haven't you? But they won't touch the wild part at the top, and they won't spoil the lake. We can still go there and enjoy ourselves.'
'If I were Hungry Hill I should be angry,' said the child. 'I should want to slay the human beings who dared interfere with me, You know how the hill looks in winter, John, when the clouds are upon it, and the rain drives down. Like a giant, frowning. If I were my father I would not have sunk my mine there, I would have found another place.'
'Yes, but other places don't have the copper, sweetheart.'
'Then I would go without the copper.'
'Don't you want to be rich, and marry an Earl, like Eliza?'
'Not in the least. I am like Barbara, I only want all of us to be happy.'
'I should be happy if I didn't owe money to half the tradesmen in Oxford,' sighed John.
'Are you very much in debt? It's a bad thing, I have heard my father say, to owe money, especially to people in a lower station than oneself.'
'It isn't bad. It's merely irritating.
Don't let's talk about it any more. I'll carry you to bed,' said John, who always changed the conversation when he drew near to matters affecting his conscience, and taking the little girl in his arms, he carried her to the room she still shared with the old nurse Martha.
Martha was at. supper, and Jane undressed solemnly before her brother, folding up her clothes as she had been taught to do, and she knelt at his knee and said her prayers with a devout intensity and a lack of embarrassment that wrung his heart. When he had kissed her and tucked her up, he went down the corridor to the drawing-room, but paused outside the door without entering. Somehow Eliza's chatter and Henry's good-natured teasing would have jarred upon him this evening, and turning round he went down by the back staircase, and so out of the side-door to the stables across the yard, where his bitch Nellie lay, with her litter of puppies.
Tim the stable-lad was awaiting him with a lantern, and together the two boys knelt in the straw, their shoulders touching, while John held the weakling of the family in his strong but gentle hands.
'Poor pup!' he said. 'We'll never make anything of him, with this squashed foot of his.'
'Better drown him, Master John,' suggested Tim.
'No, Tim, we won't do that. He's healthy enough, it's only that he'll not be winning any prizes for me, but that's no reason why I should take his life. All right, Nellie, I wouldn't hurt your babies.'
John always forgot his problems when he was with his dogs. Their devotion and their dependence brought out the best in him, and he would willingly have passed half the night in the stable but for the fact that Tim must have his supper and go to bed.
'Is it true, Master John, what they're saying in Doonhaven?' asked the lad, as he bolted the stable-door and put the empty pail down by the pump.
'What are they saying now, Tim?'
'Why, that Mr. Brodrick is going to blast away the whole of Hungry Hill with dynamite that's coming over in a ship from Bronsea, and we are all going to be turned out of our homes to make room for the Cornish miners he'll be bringing.'
'No, Tim, that's a fairy-tale, and you're a rogue to repeat it. My father is going to sink a mine in Hungry Hill, true enough, he and Mr.
Lumley, but you won't have to move for the miners. The work will give employment in Doonhaven, and bring money to the people who are out of work and have no land.'
The lad looked at him doubtfully, and shook his head.
'They say in Doonhaven it doesn't do to interfere with Nature,' he said. 'If the Saints wished for the copper to be used, why then it would be running down the side of the hill in a stream, where we could find it.'
'Who told you that, Tim? Was it Morty Donovan?'
'That is what they say in Doonhaven,' said the boy, refusing to be drawn, and he wished his young master goodnight, and took himself off to the kitchen.
John shrugged his shoulders, and thrusting his hands into his pockets he walked round the house, and down the steep grass bank to the drive and the creek beyond.
The, moon shone upon the inlet below the castle, and a broad path of silver led to the wide stretch of water around Doon Island, whose dark outline hid Mundy Bay and the open sea.
Away beyond Doonhaven, some seven miles distant from Clonmere, rose the black mass of Hungry Hill, remote and forbidding in the moonlight.
Back in the library John Brodrick spoke impatiently to his agent.
'I myself gave permission to the officers of the garrison to shoot as many snipe and woodcock as they pleased on the island,' he said, 'as long as they did not destroy a hare or a partridge, and they took it upon themselves to look after the preservation of the game as far as they could. I cannot believe that the officers, most of whom are gentlemen, would have forfeited the pledge.
And yet you say they have half the hares destroyed?'
'It's what Baird himself was telling me, Mr.
Brodrick,' said the agent, 'that it was one or two of the younger officers he saw out shooting, and Morty Donovan was with them.'
